Recomposition as metabeing

The London Sinfonietta celebrated German composer Wolfgang Rihm’s sixtieth birthday this evening at the Southbank Centre with a tight and punchy programme, which took in three recent chamber pieces from Rihm, alongside music by two of his most prominent students, Jörg Widmann and Rebecca Saunders.

As is appropriate for an evening celebrating Rihm, the programme offered up various perspectives on the phenomenon of re-composition or revision that so heavily characterises the composer’s metier. Within and across pieces, whether it be the ever-evolving Chiffre cycle (from which the slightly unremarkable Nacht-Schrift was heard tonight, featuring impressive soloist Andrew Zolinsky), or the internally snowballing and recursive Jagden und Formen, Rihm’s music seek to explore not finality but processuality, a desire reflected in Rihm’s desire for his pieces to be understood as zustände (conditions or states), and not as finite statements.

The opening Ricercare – music in memoriam Luigi Nono expressed the shifting and slippery contours of this conceit rather vividly. The piece contains in it not only remnants of Nono (and thus of all the styles important to that sadly deceased composer), but also tastes and foretastes of the other four pieces Rihm has written in his memory. The piece, or ‘condition’, is heavily composed out of Nono’s language; all of Nono is here, from the silences between delicately parsed out phrases, to the infra-serial organisational approach, to the hushed but timbrally meticulous gestures.

In its mastery of approach and its directness of homage the music steps away from pastiche into the richer realm of parody (surely a vital mode for Rihm), though in its tiniest details of articulation and weighting it falls short, just a little, of Nono’s astonishing musical gracefulness. This falling short had little to do with the Sinfonietta’s performance, which was as soft-footed and methodical as the music warranted.

The performers’ deliberation was repeated in Quartet by Saunders, a piece written for the rather tantalising line-up of double bass, bass clarinet, accordion and piano. Quartet explores slight gradations of weight and colour around a central pitch slung low across the three sustaining instruments, before crystallising somewhat in a final extended climax organised around a repeated piano cluster in the right hand. Sepulchral low tones wisped out and across the ensemble, benumbing the listener rather mysteriously.

Widmann’s Dubairische Tänze, which followed, was a wholly different proposition. It thinks and rethinks the notion of (Bavarian) carnival and popular dances such as the zwiefacher and the ländler, setting these alternately into exciting scenarios of tumbling downbeats or, on the other hand, glistening metallic lullabies. Whilst the conception and execution is never quite as original as in the recent and rather similar Feldman’s Sixpenny Editions by Gerald Barry, the effect is well achieved nonetheless. Thierry Fischer, at the ensemble’s helm, looked to be having a whale of a time.

The concert closed with Rihm’s Will Sound More Again, an update or revisioning of his earlier Will Sound More. Like Jagden und Formen, this piece moves inexorably towards some mysterious goal – or at least its agitated mutations of a few central motifs seem to suggest such a purpose. In any case, the piece, like the performance this evening, manages its devilish balance of agitation and precision very well. Its forward rush even intensifies towards the close, suggesting some drastic new resolution or compulsion which will only be confronted in a further iteration of the music at some point in the future.

At its most interesting Rihm’s mise en abyme music reveals and shows in a new light the metacompositional underpinnings of the very act of composition itself – not to mention those of listening likewise. This was a fun, engaging and stimulating concert.

Works and the comfort of the non-human

Works are myths. The album, the song, the piece, the performance, the film, the book. Humans are frail, fragile, unpredictable, so often in disappointing ways. Works comfort and coddle us, so often in extremely pleasing ways. They opppose human friction with quasi-human symmetry.

Myths are based on a transcendental condition; a non-contextual, essential, ingredient.

Inscription – the process by which works are represented/mediated/signified in the mind of the audience – is a process of myth creation.

Gr8

Facebook Official

gucci gucci, facebook official. Like Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. Old ideas of ‘quality’ truly jettisoned here. Are they in on the joke? Is there a joke? Is this stuff serious? No distance between the concept and execution. Utopia and dystopia all at once. Ferraro not transmuting the automated sounds, just attempting to replicate. For the sounds. But also as a willing subject of capital. Rebecca Black; good or bad? (think of Glee’s performance). What matters is stuff around it, the ‘stream’, the re-stream. Also, though, the quality thing; we shift. No longer is the issue hoary ‘authenticity’: that debate is undermined through radical ignorance and separation.

All wisdom ends in paradox.
more beautiful than nature.

something on relationship of form and necessity. Why is that speck there? What about that tone or noise? Why did Anselm Kiefer use a wire there? Why is that hanging off that? Is that scour necessary?

Interesting how moments or events within larger scale objects operationalise other aspects; how form and voice interplay; how things emerge.

…

Often think on idea that large portions (or at least portions) of art works are not necessarily doing much affective work, are not important in ratifying or extending people’s judgements of works.

Similarly, there are curious moments in music. What is Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ introduction if not the skull in Ambassadors, if not anamorphosis? It’s a moment of desublimation or disarticulation or forcing apart or disintegration or disjunction. A late moment. For other examples, you’d need to look to examples of classical art. You need formal rigour in order to perceive deformation. What about moro lasso, or…

Toppermost

Top 10 or top 500 or top-since-this-time-last-lunar-cycle lists are fun, but they’re constructed on an inherent contradiction.

When more than one writer is involved in the adjudication, at least an element of collation is required. However, more broadly, there is no measurement of sturdy empirical evidence out of which patterns are discerned going on here. These lists represent the sorry yoking of subjective feeling to a seemingly objective form of organisation.

They comfort us in their seeming integration of the subjective and the objective; our weak and fragile affect is metabolised into positivist rigour and replicable tabulation.

The compilation of such lists occasions a sleight of hand, an elision, a cloak and mirrors exercise meant to demonstrate a discerning where there is only an artificial production.

These lists get us going, but viewed from a certain standpoint, all they really amount to are poor qualitative/quantitative assessment tools.

And they’re evil!!!

Then again, music charts based on actual sales data are probably no less occult.

2011 and 6 December 2011

Not been on here much of late – just too bloody busy. Had toyed with writing an informal ‘best of 2011′, or something like that, but I can’t bring myself to write like that. In any case, off the top of my head…Leviathan, Prurient, Astral Social Club, Britney Spears, Bennett, Dennehy, Manoury, Beyonce, Rustie, Kanye/Jay Z, Lady Gaga, Wooden Shjips, Kim Cascone, and probably lots others, have all released great stuff this year…

…most of which would struggle to rival tonight’s stunning concert from Uchida and the LSO…

Jazz Fest

My reactions to two contrasting but enjoyable evenings at the bustling London Jazz Festival…

Rian and the spirit of gravity

It’s no accident that dance was at the centre of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, nor that it holds such importance for other philosophers and thinkers, from Badiou to Valéry. It is one of those rare forms of expression, of living, where evenness of emotion is hard to maintain in its company. One can’t help but be changed through its practice.

Nietzsche used dance as a metaphor for thought, opposing it to what he described as the ‘spirit of gravity’, a deleterious force for Nietzsche. Badiou suggests that dance is, first and foremost, ‘the image of a thought subtracted from every form of heaviness’. He also suggests that it does not present the body liberated, but instead the body in disobedience as regards its impulses. Dance thus understood is a marking out of the struggle with gravity and form imposed on us moment-to-moment in our lives.

These may seem somewhat grand and perhaps over-general notions of the dance, but they get at something vivid at its heart, a vibrant conception of space, movement and feeling which the dance also shares with musical performance, particularly broadly spontaneous, participatory musical performance.

This vibrancy, no less than this crossover of the dance and of music, is also at the heart of Fabulous Beast and Liam Ó Maonlaí’s stunning Rian. Fresh from a rapturous reception at the Dublin Theatre Festival, Rian just completed two night’s at Sadler’s Wells, the second of which I attended. These two nights, by the by, are surely a test run for a much longer stint, at least if the jubilant reaction of the crowd on the night I attended is anything to go by.

Rian takes its name and perhaps its cultural starting point from Liam Ó Maonlaí’s 2005 eponymous album of traditional and original Irish songs, written partly in tribute to Seán Ó Riada, Irish composer and the leading figure of the Irish traditional music revival. Ó Maonlaí, the lead singer of Irish rock band the Hothouse Flowers and also a respected traditional musician in his own right, has collaborated closely with the director of Fabulous Beast, Michael Keegan-Dolan, to put together the show, although the process was very much a group collaboration. The eight dancers involved, for example, came up with a repertoire of 108 named ‘natural movements’ in response to the music of the five musicians, which came to form the basis of the dance elements of Rian.

The music, meanwhile, is largely the responsibility of Ó Maonlaí, with original compositions, arrangements of traditional music, and some pieces from Rian mainly comprising the score.

Similarly, Ó Maonlaí takes the lead on stage, moving seamlessly between piano, bodhrán, harp, guitar, and tin whistle, most of the while singing meditatively to his own accompaniments. And yet even if Ó Maonlaí can be said to be musically key, the contributions of his four band mates are indispensable. They each achieve at moments a beauty that is easily comparable to anything realised by Ó Maonlaí. Special mention must go in this regard to the sweetly chaste but expressively rich voice of Eithne Ní Chatháin, who sings ‘Lough Erne’s Shore’ so romantically, and the colourful and exciting pipering of Maitiú Ó Casaide, whose own arrangement and solo performance of three famous traditional tunes, to the accompaniment of writhing-in-mid-air (on chairs) dancers and musicians (whose shadows created wonderful effects on the back wall), proved a highlight of this highlight-heavy show.

Both music and dance move deftly in and out of each other, and across their own internal movements, in Rian. The show does not concern itself with a narrative as such, apart from a well-managed emotional and dynamic rise and fall, but prefers to gain its coherence through the rhyming of its two core elements.

But what does it mean to say that, in this production, dance and music fuse and emerge out of each other? At the heart of the group performance of Irish traditional music, as with so many folk traditions from around the world, is a direct simplicity of material and gesture, and a cyclical and building sense of form. A dance melody is heard for eight bars, and then a second, again for eight bars. These melodies then simply repeat, with musicians joining and varying the melodies slightly as things go on. If the musicians are performing a set, then the original dance will shift after a short time to another, with the same formal principle holding for the new melodies.

This simple but exciting process of repetition and variation is the exact form the Keegan-Dolan gives to the dance in Rian. Just as the musicians play games with each other, joining in a duet or teasing in separation, or coming together as a total ensemble, the dancers likewise make each short section (which run for as long as the musical piece runs) a game of teasing interaction and joyous coming together.

Another simple touch that works to elide the music and dance in Rian is that, throughout the show, the musicians find themselves dancing, naturally, and why shouldn’t they? Likewise, the dancers often sing out a harmony or a holler, or bang a drum along enthusiastically with the music. Like a great opera, Rian is internally cohesive and totally integrated (!)

And, just as the material of the music is quotidian, simple, but capable of great expression, the rhythms and shapes of Rian‘s dancers evoke normal everyday attitudes, shaken up and exalted by illumination. A routine will often start, for instance, with each dancer entering by mimicking the entrance of their partners, where in one memorable instance this entrance comprised the dancer shaking themselves into movement as if trying to warm up. The effect of the imitation is to draw the audience into a sense of something being gradually worked out, a collective coming together articulated through both dance and music. Often routines will evoke a gradual falling into place of the whole ensemble, or a full working out of the game-like shapes a dancing couple throw around each other.

The dancing is often less cohesive or mannered as this may make it sound – for example the dancers often simply jump up and down or run out of steam happily and trail away seemingly spontaneously. And though this looseness, as with the seemingly conventional or habitual actual movements of many of the dances, might suggest a bunch of happy amateurs, this company is filled with anything but. The technique and confidence of expression displayed on stage is often breathtaking.

So here’s hoping the show makes a quick return. It’s far from perfect, of course, and there are it has to be said a few moments of lost focus and comparably mundane activity. However, generally speaking the momentum and the achievement is largely sustained for the whole 110 minutes.

This could then be a new Riverdance, a Riverdance with a modern imagination, a Riverdance infused with the spirit of the fragment, the beauty of the accident, and the astounding absence of cynicism you so rarely find in great art.

Lynchian Wagner – Wagnerian Lynch

Here’s my review of the first revival of Tim Albery’s Der fliegende Holländer at Covent Garden.

The Passenger

Britten and Shostakovich wrote some excellent music. Weinberg was listening!